Skip to main content

Chasing the Sun – Richard Cohen ****

The tagline to this book is ‘the epic story that gives us life’ and that word epic gives pause for thought. It has good connotations (‘an epic adventure’ or just the modern adjective ‘epic!’) – but equally it can suggest a monster tome that is going to be a bit of a drag. Time will tell.
What Richard Cohen sets out to do is give a comprehensive if personal exploration of humanity’s relationship with the sun, from science to religion, sunlight to gravity. It surely is a subject that deserves this kind of treatment, and parts of this book are wonderful in the way they provide so many factoids and quite interesting (in the QI sense) deviations into all sorts of very slightly sun-related areas. I could pick out so many, but one little part that caught my fancy was a collection of early 20th century beliefs about strong sunlight, including the need to wear flannel spine pads, as the sun was thought to damage the backbone, and the requirement to wear hats indoors in buildings with metal roofs as the sun was thought to be able to penetrate iron.
From all the source books listed, this clearly is a tome that has been researched in great depth, but for me the book was too long. At 610 fairly large pages before you reach the source notes, it goes on and on. Sometimes this comes through in the examples, which can stretch out into rather long lists. Also it worries me that we get far more on the description of the other people who went to watch a solar eclipse from the Antarctic with the author, than we do about the work of Bequerel and the Curies combined, which just doesn’t seem right.
The other slight concern is that the author can be a little hand-waving about the science. There is sometimes the feeling that you are reading something written by someone who is fluent in a foreign language. He gets most of it right, but it doesn’t always feel natural. Just to pick out a couple of examples:
We hear that nuclear reactor ‘cones’ purposely imitate the lingam shape of Hindu temple domes. What cones? How do they imitate lingams? For that matter why does he say these cones are the latest tribute the Sun’s potency? What’s the connection?
He says the division of degrees (of angle) into 60 minutes and those into 60 seconds is a method ‘curiously close to that of a modern computer.’ In what way?
He tells us the neutron is ‘the most common form of particle lurking inside virtually all nuclei’ – most common how? What about neutrinos? Or all those hydrogen nuclei? What about quarks, for that matter?
Don’t take my concerns too negatively. There is plenty to enjoy in this book, both in quirky exploration of humanity’s attitude to the sun and in the author’s obvious enthusiasm. The contents are often fascinating, and I think will particularly appeal to arty types who may have previously been scared by science, but to have made a five star popular science book it would have been better at half the length with a touch more certainty about the science.

Paperback:  


Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more